THE BITTERWEED PATH

A tender and perceptive handling of a difficult theme -- the love of a man for a man, in a strange triangle story, set in a Mississippi town. An orphaned boy, Darrell, son of a share cropper, is befriended by Malcolm Pitt, the man in the big house, and becomes so enmeshed in emotional relationship to the man himself, to his son, to his daughter, that he is haunted by the need to prove himself able to stand alone. Yet even in his sudden marriage, he finds he cannot break. And his marriage- and the son, Roger's marriage, both crash on the issue of their need for each other. The father, Malcolm Pitt, seems big enough to compass the complexities of his own dual nature, but he has planted the need for a man's love in Darrell -- and strengthened the link between them so it cannot be broken, by always keeping Darrell obligated, in small things and large. More outspoken than others in this genre, there is nonetheless a skillful skirting of the distasteful, a recognition of the psychological shadings. Not a book for the general public; important that both librarians and booksellers should know its theme in presenting it to the public.